GNUSTEP live CD 2.5 released

After almost 8 years (we talked about it, of course), a new version of the GNUSTEP live CD has been released – version 2.5, for amd64. The live CD is based on Debian 9, has low hardware requirements, and uses Linux 4.9 with compressed RAM and no systemd. The live CD is a very easy and non-destructive way of testing out and playing with GNUSTEP, a free software implementation of OPENSTEP.

It’s been a long, long time since I got to use our glorious *STEP database category. Isn’t that one beautiful icon?

A lot of Etoile was brought back into GNUstep itself. So GNUstep does have themability, it is supposed to build and run your apps on macOS, and Windows (maybe someone will make a Reactos CD with GNUstep?).

Still no browser, still no system preferences controls for audio/networking/X11. Still very obscure and minimally useful. I’d really love for this to get picked up by people, but I’m starting to give up on all these cool little projects which are going nowhere. It’s a shame, because the developers are lovely people, I’m on the mailing list, but I need to face reality and move on.

I also spent some time there on the past, and for a few years I even used AfterStep followed by WindowMaker as my main window managers.

But given that most of their talks at FOSDEM were related to building theme engines, catching up with Panther and they lacked a workable Objective-C 2.x implementation, it was clear it would go nowhere.

SystemPreferences you have. A web browser, no. Is there any *usable* web browser for Linux? I mean besides links (yeah the console one). If you think of Mozilla or Google, please don’t ruin my day. The latter is good for PDF viewing. Other than that, both projects are memory leakers. For LibreOffice, OpenOffice I will refer you to: http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/sun/

Yeah, and in the 10 years I’ve been following System Preferences.app there’s still no way to set the system volume/sound card options, configure X11, or configure networking. Basic features that Gnome/KDE/Windows/Apple have had for years. This is the problem with these projects. There are enough languages to choose from on Linux/BSD/HURD. Objective-C/Swift isn’t compelling enough and hasn’t got a large enough base of applications to bother with. It could be different if there was a desktop environment that actually worked and had a cohesive Next-like philosophy. But all there is is a half supported API and a bunch of apps which have functional replacements everywhere else. I know this is negative as heck, but after 10-15 years following this project. It’s clear it’s going nowhere. It’s a shame, because GNUstep actually let you setup the apps to work like Windows/Apple/Nextstep with a single environment variable. Combined with Etoile’s menu server you could cobble together something that started to look/feel like OSX. But the terminal.app hasn’t even got tabbed views, and there is no web browser which considering the importance of the web these days is pretty big for most people… Anyway the point is, 10 years, almost 0 progress, nothing compelling using it. Just small apps that are barely maintained, and only in the sense that they can start. Even if the project’s only goal had been to clone just one of Apple’s media apps it would have been a better use of time/manpower.

There are 10 people on the project. You’re expecting from GNUstep what has come from other projects which have hundreds of contributors or have the backing of huge companies like RedHat, SuSE, IBM, etc. We are a small set of people who love what we do, cut us a little slack. If you want to help, you’re welcome to, but complaining about what we don’t have and lurking on the list isn’t helping.

Is there any *usable* web browser for Linux? I mean besides links (yeah the console one). If you think of Mozilla or Google, please don’t ruin my day. The latter is good for PDF viewing. Other than that, both projects are memory leakers.

I just don’t want gtk or qt. gtk simply not for the desaster of developers have whenever there’s a major new version, and for gconf disaster with configuration files (worse than windows registry, or at least equally bad).

I’ve tried gtk1, 2, and 3.

https://webkit.org is nice. It just needs some more work to work and an application (prefereably using #include <AppKit/AppKit.h>). Something like, Safari… I’m fine using links (instead of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome or Chromium). It’s just quite a few pages don’t work because they think everyone needs javascript and CSS. Let’s not even get started with Adobe Flash.

A great web page works in links. And still can look great with CSS. That is how HTML was meant to be, see the web consoritum. And the first original web browser had edit functions in (WYSIWYG, remember Display PostScript, on NeXT?), it just never was picked up by netscape, nor others.

Anyways, it’s up to anyones choice to use the tool he wants to get accomplished whatever they want to do.

I don’t understand this claim of memory leaks. I’ve heard people claim it but on every single one of my computers I run Firefox. I’ve had my work laptop (Fedora 26 now) go for over a month without logging out (suspend to RAM) and Firefox never becomes bloated.

So I can’t understand what people are doing to their poor Firefox profile. It must be extensions they install, is all I can imagine.

Or they confuse temporary memory growth with a leak. Sites with heavy Javascript usage do use a lot of RAM and they can in fact continue to use more and more RAM if they keep appending new information to an array, for example. But close the tab and wait for a GC cycle and all that RAM gets cleared.

Really GNUstep is about to lift of, after the GSOC 2017 (Web Browser developments API side). And then having it ready with Reactos, and maybe GNU/kFreeBSD, Minix3, Plan9?, GNU/Hurd… It really is a pity the kickstarting didn’t work.

Virtual PC only supports emulation of a 32 bit processor. Try Virtual Box. This trips up a lot of people.

Our up stream produces up VM’s in VirtualPC format for integration testing of services, and so we still need VPC hanging about. It’s a crappy VM to be honest. The version that integrates in to Windows 7 is very basic, I always try to use the 2007 distro as this at least runs as a program rather than a half arsed partly integrated Explorer extension. The integrated version only needed to really run XP, so it definitely does not support anything other than 32-bit.

LOL, my mistake I did mean virtualbox, havn’t used virtual PC for years.

It worked strait away for me, so there’s probably something wrong with your virtualbox and not the live cd. Make sure it’s configured for a 64bit guest. The GUI is ancient and there’s barely anything installed to show it off so IMHO your not missing too much.

As you might have noticed, there’s almost no software. Indeed it’s meant for developers, as there’s git, clang/gcc, emacs, manpages, and GNUstep with Gorm.

Read some docs from /var/www on the CD, and write software, or refer to http://www.gnustep.org for documentation. Sorry guys, unless you’re a Terminal/console user, it’s not for you. Unless you want something small, with low hardware requirements, and want to play nethack.

I seem to spend an awful lot of time making sure we don’t break the GNUstep build of Emacs, but the Emacs developers think that nobody uses it. It’s nice to see that it’s at least making it onto the live CD.

When I saw the article I thought we would see some progress on GNUStep. But the truth it that little or – to my perception – no visible further development has happened.

It is a real pity because from a software architecture point of view, this is a so much better platform than all the other desktop environments we are seeing today. If I was a devoloper I would much rather want to work on this than all the other stuff the industry is heading for today, especially everything that is integrating ‘web technologies’ into the basic application framework.

The point is, you don’t see the development. wayland suppord is there (just not released yet). And why not step up and learn programming, there’s some great tutorials. Even if you dislike Objective-C, learn Swift, and hope for GNUstep swift bindings, REALLY SOON, COMRADE

The problem here is that Window Maker is based on WINGS (Wings Is Not Gnu Step). So the central element of the GUI uses a different widget system, that looks more or less the same, but has its own libraries.

Etoile was addressing this, but the new window manager was never finished

… or was it? “Azalea” is deprecated again and replaced with something new

Why would the look & feel change? NEXTstep was already the best-looking GUI in the world by the end of the 1980s. Nothing has surpassed it yet. So why change it?

Because it lacks responsiveness and usability.

For me, if it had awesome usability, its look wouldn’t be a strong consideration. But really, it doesn’t. E.g with most current UIs you have some text input field and if there is a smart algorithm at work under the hood, entering a search term gives you whatever you were looking for in an instant, be it a programme, a document, a contact, an event or a location. Also, connecting a USB stick to my computer causes it to be mounted or at least gives me some visual or audible feedback telling me that the system has detected it. Or I get startup notifications for programmes I have launched, or I have a notification area for all those programmes which use it etc. I don’t see any of that it the GNUstep live CD. It really feels very much like when I started using Linux around 18 years ago, with Fvwm and the like. If that’s what I want, that’s fine, but I don’t see how GNUstep gives me any additional benefit there either.

The fact that this means that they have also implemented most of an entire desktop, complete with accessories, seems to be more or less a a happy accident, an unplanned but happy side-effect of the development and testing of the class library framework.